Theologies of Auspicious Kingship: The Islamization of Chinggisid Sacral Kingship in the Islamic World

This article explores the fashioning of a new discursive realm of Islamic kingship in thirteenth–fourteenth-century Mongol-ruled Iran (the Ilkhanate). It examines how literati, historians, and theologians ingeniously experimented at the Ilkhanid court with Persian and Islamic concepts and titles to translate and elaborate their Mongol patrons’ claims to govern through a unique affinity with heaven. The fusion of Mongol and Islamic elements formulated a new political vocabulary of auspicious, sacred, cosmic, and messianic rulership that Turco-Mongol Muslim courts, starting in the fifteenth century, extensively appropriated and expanded to construct new models of imperial authority. A comparison with Buddhist and Confucian assimilative approaches to the Mongol heaven-derived kingship points to a reciprocal process. Mongol rulers were not simply poured into preset Muslim and Persian molds; symbols and titles were selectively appropriated and refashioned into potent vessels that could convey a vision of Islamic kingship that addressed Chinggisid expectations. From their desire to collect and assume local religious and political traditions that could support and enhance their own legitimizing claims, the Mongols set in motion a process that led to their own integration into the Perso-Islamic world, and also facilitated the emergence of new political theologies that enabled models of divine kingship to inhabit the Islamic monotheistic world.

2 Samarqandī, Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn, v. 3, 162–65. Shāhrukh's patronizing tone can be detected in the title, naṣīḥat nāmah (letters of counsel), given to his reply to the Ming.

3 For the Ming, see David M. Robinson, “Controlling Memory and Movement: The Early Ming Court and the Changing Chinggisid World,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient (forthcoming, March 2019). For the Timurids and the Jalayirids, see Beatrice Manz, “Mongol History Rewritten and Relived,” Revue des mondes musulmans de la Méditerranée 89–90 (2000): 129–49; Broadbridge, Anne, Kingship and Ideology in the Mamluk and Mongol Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 174–87; Wing, Patrick, Dynastic State Formation in the Mongol Middle East (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 129–46, 185–201. For a comparative approach, see Biran, Michal, Chinggis Khan (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007).

4 Yongle's expansive geographical aspirations and Ming rhetoric of inclusive rulership were shaped by Yuan and Chinggisid precedents. See Robinson, “Controlling Memory”; and his “Delimiting the Realm under the Ming Dynasty,” in Michal Biran et al., eds., “Universality and Its Limits: Spatial Dimensions of Eurasian Empires” (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2018).

6 Christopher A. Markiewicz, “The Crisis of Rule in Late Medieval Islam: A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861–926/1457–1520) and Kingship at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015), 311, 330–41. For the ritual and performative aspects of Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal sacral kingship, see Moin, Millennial Sovereign; and “Sovereign Violence: Temple Destruction in India and Shrine Desecration in Iran and Central Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History57, 2 (2015): 467–96.

8 For Timurid claims to their succession to the Ilkhans, see Manz, “Mongol History.”

9 Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology.

10 See, for instance, the gradual formation of a Mongol religious policy from “a series of separate decisions taken by Chinggis Khan during his conquest[s]…”; Atwood, Christopher P., “Validation by Holiness or Sovereignty: Religious Toleration as Political Theology in the Mongol World Empire of the Thirteenth Century,” International History Review26, 2 (2004): 237–56.

11Baumann, Brian, “By the Power of Eternal Heaven: The Meaning of Tenggeri to the Government of the Pre-Buddhist Mongols,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident35 (2013): 233–84, 270–72.

15 In Weberian terms, the Mongols assumed and deployed sedentary tools that they found useful for further routinizing the charisma of the imperial founder. Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, eds. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 246, 251.

16Strathern, Alan, “Transcendental Intransigence: Why Rulers Rejected Monotheism in Early Modern Southeast Asia and Beyond,” Comparative Studies in Society and History49, 2 (2007): 358–83, 365. Reversion, therefore, became a significant avenue for converting the Mongols. Compare, for example, the depiction of Chinggis Khan as a proto-Confucian with his presentation as a proto-monotheist: Atwood, Christopher P., “Explaining Rituals and Writing History: Tactics against the Intermediate Class,” in Charleux, Isabelle et al. , eds., Presenting Power in Ancient Inner Asia: Legitimacy, Transmission and the Sacred (Bellingham: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 2010), 95–129; and Amitai, R., “Did Chinggis Khan Have a Jewish Teacher? An Examination of an Early Fourteenth-Century Arabic Text,” Journal of the American Oriental Society124, 4 (2004): 691–705.

17Jackson, Peter, “World Conquest and Local Accommodation: Threat and Blandishment in Mongol Diplomacy,” in Pfeiffer, Judith and Quinn, S. A., eds., History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 3–22.

21Elverskog, Johan, Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaiˋi Press, 2006), 48–62.

22 On immanentist (divinized) and transcendentalist models of kingship, see Strathern, Alan, “Global Patterns of Ruler Conversion to Islam and the Logic of Empirical Religiosity,” in Peacock, A.C.S., ed., Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 21–55.

23 Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 48–52; DeWeese, Islamization, 524. It remains to be examined to what extent this connection was established through a cohesive ritual program based on earlier steppe precedent or was instead an evolving, contingent amalgamation of ritual aspects assumed from other traditions.

24 Genealogical seniority was determined by a hierarchical system of “chief wives” and degrees of descent from Chinggis Khan. See Jackson, Peter, “The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire,” Central Asiatic Journal22, 3 (1978): 186–244, 193–95; Shai Shir, “‘The Chief Wife’ at the Courts of the Mongol Khans during the Mongol World Empire (1206–1260)” (MA thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006 [in Hebrew]).

25 For knowledge of Chinggis Khan's edicts as a criterion for electing the khan, and the continuity of the Chinggisid mission, see Lane, George, “Intellectual Jousting and the Chinggisid Wisdom Bazaars,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society26, 1–2 (2016): 235–47, 246; Amitai, Reuven, Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol Ilkhanate (1260–1335) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

28 Joseph Fletcher discusses the latter as the principle of tanistry, according to which the successor is the most qualified member of the clan; “The Mongols: Ecological and Social Perspectives,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies46, 1 (1986): 11–50, 16–19. A tension also existed between the ideal of corporate, shared sovereignty among the Chinggisid family and claims to patrilineal-based authority. Judith Pfeiffer, Conversion to Islam among the Ilkhans in Muslim Narrative Traditions: The Case of Aḥmad Tegüder (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003), 172–75.

29 Compare, for example, how Shīʿī agents appealed to the Mongols at the Ilkhanid court by suggesting the affinity between Chinggisid descent-based authority and the Shīʿī principle of descent from the Prophet, and how Tibetan Buddhists used the merit-based model of cakravartin kingship (the wheel-turning sage kings and universal emperors) to argue for the continuity of Qubilai (r. 1260–1294) and his heirs with Chinggis Khan through their adoption of and support for the Dharma. Furthermore, the Ilkhanid ruler Öljeitü, himself a Shīʿī convert, used a comparison with Shīʿīsm/Sayyidism to support the claim that non-Chinggisid commanders could not hold the Ilkhanid throne. Pfeiffer, Judith, “Confessional Ambiguity vs. Confessional Polarization: Politics and the Negotiation of Religious Boundaries in the Ilkhanate,” in Pfeiffer, Judith, ed., Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 129–70; Franke, Herbert, From Tribal Chieftain to Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yuan Dynasty (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978), 54–59.

30 The Mongol understanding of conversion and religion, therefore, fits also that of non-transcendentalist (or cosmothiestic) societies, in which religious traditions were “mutually transparent and compatible” (Assmann) and rulers were ready “to accept new gods and rites in an endless cycle of invention” (Strathern). Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3; Strathern, “Transcendental Intransigence,” 364. The Mongols, indeed, viewed their affinity to heaven, and heaven itself (tenggeri, the supreme sky-god of the steppe), to be translatable and compatible with other religious systems. Thus, Allāh, Khudā, Tian, and Deus were all fit as “transparent translation[s]” for tenggeri, and religious experts were all praying to the same deity. Atwood, “Validation,” 252–53.

34 A transition toward a new conception of royal Muslim authority can be detected earlier, especially in influential Persian works of political ethics (“advice literature”) and Sufi manuals, yet this did not coalesce into a full-fledged and widely promulgated model of sacral Muslim kingship as we find it in the post-Mongol period. Arjomand, Saïd Amir, “Legitimacy and Political Organization: Caliphs, Kings and Regimes,” in Irwin, Robert, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 240–54. On the other hand, we can also observe in the post-Mongol model of sacral kingship certain continuities with caliphal monarchy. On the Late Antique notions of sacral kingship as the background for the caliphate, see al-Azmeh, Aziz, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001).

35Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Turning the Stones Over: Sixteenth-Century Millenarianism from the Tagus to the Ganges,” Indian Economic and Social History Review40, 2 (2003): 129–61. Only after the Mongol period do we notice the appearance of imperial Muslim shrines, which Moin argues were interlinked with a new style of sovereignty that drew on the symbols and rituals of Muslim sainthood; “Sovereign Violence,” 467–96.

38Bashir, Shahzad, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nūrbakhshīya between Medieval and Modern Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 29–41.

39 The eschatological classification of the tajdīd tradition was a later innovation, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Landau-Tasseron, Ella, “The ‘Cyclical Reform’: A Study of the Mujaddid Tradition,” Studia Islamica70 (1989): 79–117; Freidman, Yohanan, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Aḥmadī Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 97.

42Subtelny, Maria Eva, “The Sunni Revival under Shāh-Rukh and Its Promoters: A Study of the Connection between Ideology and Higher Learning in Timurid Iran,” Proceedings of the 27th Meeting of Haneda Memorial Hall. Symposium on Central Asia and Iran, August 30, 1993 (Kyoto: Institute of Inner Asian Studies, Kyoto University, 1994), 14–23.

43 Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 261–65.

44 The work has several titles. The fullest appears to be “The Epistle of the Sultan on the Debates on Prophethood” (al-Risāla al-sulṭāniyya fī al-mabāḥith al-nabawiyya) or “on the Prophetic Ranks” (fī al-marātib al-nabawiyya), but it is also known as The Debates of the Sultan (Mabāḥith al-sulṭāniyya). On this interesting work and its manuscripts, see Josef Van Ess, Der Wesir und seine Gelehrten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981), 17–19. I have used the Persian manuscript of Kitāb-i sulṭāniyya, Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Nuruosmaniye 3415.

47 The vizier's example predated the earliest usage of the title for political leaders, for which see Van Steenbergen, Jo, “Qalāwūnid Discourse, Elite Communication, and the Mamluk Cultural Matrix: Interpreting a 14th-Cenutry Panegyric,” Journal of Arabic Literature43 (2012): 1–28.

48 The vizier's “innovation” had no lasting influence with later authors, who used the unaltered version. See, for example, Ḥasan's, Ūzūn “Sunni tajdīd” claims. Woods, John E., The Aqquyunlu (Salt Lake City, 1999, rev. and expanded), 100–6, 140.

49 Subtelny, “Sunni Revival.” Samarqandī (d. 1482), though, claimed that Shāhrukh was the mujaddid since he was appointed ruler (salṭanat) of Khurasan in the Hijri year of 800. Samarqandī, Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn, v. 3, 494–96.

52 Compare with Hülegü’s letter to King Louis IX of France (1262), in which Teb Tenggeri's prophecy is embedded into a Christian-biblical framework, and thus depicted as the final link in a chain of prophetic communications to mankind; Aigle, “Letters of Eljigidei,” 152–53.

53 ʿAbd Allāh al-Qāshānī is mainly known for his history of Ghāzān's brother, Öljeitü. His narrative can be found in an iteration of the Ta'rīkh-i mubārak-i Ghāzānī, found in the Paris manuscript (Bibliothèque Nationale, Supplément persan, 1113), which Karl Jahn used for his edition (Geschichte Ġāzān-Ḫān's aus dem Tarīḫ-i mubārak-i-ġāzānī [London: Luzac & Co., 1940]), and in the St. Petersburg manuscript (dated to 1576), which ʿAlī Zādah used for his 1957 edition (Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, ʿAbd al-Karīm ʿAlī Zādah, ed. [Baku, 1957], v. 3, 579–619). As Kamola recently noted, while Ghāzān's “alternative” conversion narrative is missing in the Paris manuscript, it is found in full in ʿAlī Zādah's edition (the St. Petersburg manuscript). Kamola, Rashīd al-Dīn, 89–93.

54 Rashīd al-Dīn/ʿAlī Zādah, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, 604–7.

55 Qāshānī’s reference to the regal signs on Ghāzān's “forehead” is echoed in the account of Sorghan's prediction of Chinggis's rise in the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. According to the prophecy, Chinggis Khan's success was predestined since “heavenly assistance and regal splendor (farr-i shāhī) patently shine (lā’iḥ) from his forehead.” This observation is missing in the second appearance of this prediction in the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. Faḍl Allāh Abū al-Khayr Rashīd al-Dīn, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, Muḥammad Rawshan and Muṣṭafā Mūsavī, eds. (Tehran, 1373/1994), v. 1, 181, 376; Rashīd al-Dīn, Rashīd uddin Fazlullah's Jamiʿu't-Tawarikh: A History of the Mongols, W. M. Thackston, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1998–1999), v. 1, 97, 181.

56 “The tyrants and offenders” may be the Mamluks (see the Ilkhanid letter below), the Ilkhans’ rivals in Egypt and Syria.

57 Completed in 1223, The Path of God's Bondsmen (Mirṣād al-ʿIbād) gained considerable popularity after Rāzī’s death. The resemblance between the Sufi manual and Qāshānī’s narrative has also been noted by Kamola (Rashīd al-Dīn, 183).

60 On the transition from penitential to providential responses to the Mongols, see Devin DeWeese, “‘Stuck in the throat of Chingiz Khan’: Envisioning the Mongol Conquests in some Sufi Accounts from the 14th to 17th Centuries,” in J. Pfeiffer and S. A. Quinn, eds., History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 23–60; Pfeiffer, “Confessional Ambiguity,” 133–38.

64 Consider, for instance, how the author mentions the prediction of the astrologers alongside that of the religious scholars, thus aligning the providential appearance and revival of Islam of the anticipated king with Iranian astrological cyclical rhythms of salvific kingship. On Perso-Islamic astrological determinism, see Arjomand, Saïd Amir, “The Conception of Revolution in Persianate Political Thought,” Journal of Persianate Studies5 (2012): 1–16.

65 Ghāzān is the first ruler to take on the title of the Pādshāh-i Islām, a fitting Perso-Islamic synthesis, and was described as the initiator of a new era of Iranian history. Melville, Charles, “History and Myth: The Persianisation of Ghāzān Khan,” in Jeremias, Eva M., ed., Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the 11th–17th Centuries (Piliscsaba: Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 2002/2003), 133–60.

66 For the five texts related to Ghāzān's occupation, see Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology, 73–80.

71 For the conversion narrative, see Rashīd al-Dīn/ʿAlī Zādah, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, 604–5. The letter, which references the “authority verse” no less than three times, links the verse to the demand for unwavering Mamluk submission, and moreover accuses the Mamluks of transgressing God's command by repeatedly disobeying and killing “those in authority” among them. Al-Manṣūrī, Zubdat al-fikra, 333–34.

72 I borrow this term from al-Azmeh, Aziz, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 41.

75 Another line in the poem reads: “You have cultivated the world with your justice and generosity and the justice, of a hundred like Kisrās serving at your court.” For Ghāzān as mahdī, see also Banākatī’s poem from August 1303; ibid., 468.

76 The poet might have received his inspiration from Ilkhanid decrees that expanded the duo of heaven's blessing and the Chinggisid fortune to incorporate also the Prophet Muḥammad. See Cleaves, Francis Woodman, “The Mongolian Documents in the Musée de Téhéran,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies16/1–2 (1953): 1–107, 23, 26.

78 The Sunnī mahdī designated an eschatological figure, an apocalyptic world-ruler, and a cyclical reformer, or “a mujaddid-like mahdī” who appears periodically to set the community aright after its corruption and restore morality and order. Garcia-Arenal, Mercedes, Messianism and Puritanical Reform: Mahdīs in the Muslim West, Beagles, Martin, trans. (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 20; Yücesoy, Messianic Beliefs, 133, 139–40.

79 Markiewicz, “Crisis of Rule,” 311–18. Ṣāḥibqirān did gain some currency in thirteenth-century Ilkhanid historiography. The Ilkhanid historian Juvaynī describes Ögedei (r. 1229–1241) as ṣāḥibqirān, who follows the examples of Ḥātim al- Ṭāʾī (the famous pre-Islamic Arab warrior-poet) and Anūshirvān, connecting Ögedei to two pre-Islamic figures known for their generosity and justice. Juvaynī, Ta'rīkh-i jahān gushā, v. 3, 190; Juvaynī, Genghis Khan, v. 2, 234. During the Ilkhanid period, the title does not appear to be restricted to the ruler rank. Thus, Rashīd al-Dīn referred to himself as ṣāḥibqirān (Kamola, Rashīd al-Dīn, 102, 248).

80 Moin, Millennial Sovereign; Derek Mancini-Lander, Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2012), 244–67.

84 Aqsarāʾī, Musāmarat al-akhbār, 3–6; Melville, Charles, “The Early Persian Historiography of Anatolia,” in Pfeiffer, J. and Quinn, S. A., eds., History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 45–46. Aqsarāʾī’s history ends just prior to Temürtash's revolt and although the author does not explicitly refer to the revolt or to Temürtash's mahdī-claim, he does mention that Temürtash was campaigning to reinforce public morality and was implementing anti-Christian policies, and adds that these exhibited “the signs of the manifestation of the mahdī”; Musāmarat al-akhbār, 310–27.

95Kitāb-i sulṭāniyya, ff. 135r–36v. Rashīd al-Dīn makes similar statements about Ghāzān in the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, though they are not nearly as elaborate as what he says about Öljeitü. Rashīd al-Dīn/Rawshan, v. 2, 1335–41; Rashīd al-Dīn/Thackston, v. 3, 664–69.

99 For instance, the Armenian priest Grigor Aknerc'i writes that Chinggis received from a gold-feathered, eagle-like angel “all the commandments of God in his own language.” Pogossian, Zaroui, “An ‘Un-known and Unbridled People’: Vardan Arewelcʿi's Colophon on the Mongols,” Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies23 (2014): 7–48, 36–37.

111Book of the Sultan originates with Öljeitü’s question to the religious scholars assembled in Gāvbārī in March 1307 (Ramaḍān 706) of why revelation received through the mediation of angels, as in the case with the Prophet Muḥammad, is considered superior to unmediated revelation; that is, revelation received without intermediaries (e.g., in dreams). Kitāb-i sulṭāniyya, ff. 147v–50r.

112 Franke, From Tribal Chieftain, 54–59. Elverskog also shows how under the sixteenth-century Mongols in Inner Asia “political authority came to be ritualized through parallel systems of legitimacy: God's blessing and the Dharma” (Our Great Qing, 54–62).

114 For the cakravartin, see Phags-pa, Prince Jiṅ-Gim's Textbook, 39–43.

115 Baumann, “By the Power,” 273–78.

116 This is best exhibited by the vizier's three refutations of reincarnation. I am currently working on a separate study of these treatises that also examines the extent to which Rashīd al-Dīn's political theology was influenced by his exposure to and competition with Buddhism.

117 Strathern, “Ruler Conversion,” 38.

118 The commonalities between Buddhist and (early modern) Muslim models of sacral kingship have also been noted by Blackburn, Anne M., in “Buddhist Technologies of Statecraft and Millennial Moments,” History and Theory56, 1 (2017): 71–79.

119 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 31–37; Mancini-Lander, Memory, 252–53; Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 254–55. Only from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries do we find astrologically supported arguments for designating the ruler as ṣāḥibqirān, which suggests that the title lacked a fixed meaning and was subject to ongoing experimentation.

124 On the self-fashioning of early modern kings, see Kathryn Babayan's discussion of Shah Thamasb's Memoir and his self-portrayal as “mystic-king,” in Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 295–348. For the new “discursive realm” of Muslim kingship more generally, see Moin, Millennial Sovereign. I think that we need to reassess Moin's arguments that this new discursive realm was rooted less in a “scriptural Islam” and more in popular imaginations and devotional practice, and that, moreover, a clear-cut distinction between the two spheres should be drawn.

125 See, for example, Yazdī’s attempt to redefine the “caliphate” according to his new “theological absolutism.” Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 251–86.

126 See Woods, John, “The Rise of Tīmūrid Historiography,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies46, 2 (1987), 81–108, 104–5; Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 253. Then again, in early modern Central Asia we find “a much closer, and often self-conscious, articulation of the mutual reinforcement, rather than opposition, of Islamic frameworks and Chinggisid prerogatives.” DeWeese, Devin, “Telling Women's Stories in 16th-Century Central Asia: A Book of Guidance in Chaghatay Turkic for a Royal Lady of the Bukharan Court,” Oriens43, 1–2 (2015): 154–222, 215.

127 This was plainly stated by Beatrice Manz nearly three decades ago, in “Tamerlane and the Symbolism of Sovereignty,” Iranian Studies21, 1–2 (1988): 105–22, 117.